Where celebrities meet – the ACA Annual Conference 2012

There are only six weeks to go until the ACA Annual Conference. This year, the well-established event takes place in Helsinki from 10 to 12 June and is co-organised by ACA’s Finnish member, CIMO.

The 2012 ACA Annual Conference bears the title Tying it all together. For a reason: it addresses four issues - internationalisation, excellence, funding and the social dimension – and it looks at the ways they are interconnected. These four themes are often separately addressed at higher education conferences, but they are very rarely discussed together. This leads to a reduction of perspectives, to an “atomisation” of the higher education debate. ACA wants to avoid this mistake. We intend to “tie it all together” and to take a “holistic” view.

The hallmark of ACA conferences is excellence. We select our speakers very carefully and we have one single criterion for choice: top quality. The Helsinki conference features many renowned specialists. Among them are Jamil Salmi, the World Bank’s former tertiary education coordinator and author of The challenge of establishing world-class universities, Sir Peter Scott, of London University’s Institute of Education and former editor in chief of the Times Higher Education Supplement as well as an earlier ACA President, and Joan Dassin, who is in charge of the Ford Foundation’s rightly famous International Fellowships Program. Not to speak of Ulrich Grothus, the DAAD’s Deputy Secretary General, Rolf Hoffmann, Executive Director of the German-American Fulbright Commission, David Crosier, of EURYDICE, Sijbolt Noorda, ACA President and chief executive of the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, Liqiu Meng, Munich Tech’s Senior Vice-President for International Alliances, and many others…